By Sarah Oughton April 10, 2012 at 11:56 am
Before mid-morning it is already hot in Tin Akoff and Mohamed Ingouda, 46, stands patiently in line waiting for his Burkinabe Red Cross food voucher.
“We are all suffering due to the bad rain and bad harvest,” says Mohamed, who is a farmer. “I have 11 children to feed and of course I have a problem to find food.”
In 1974, Mohamed moved to the Ivory Coast where he had a job as a fishmonger, but in 2007 he lost his job and went home to Tin Akoff, in the north of Burkina Faso. Like most people in the Sahel region where he lives, Mohamed now survives by growing millet and sorghum and tending livestock.
Access to food
Failed crops, rising food prices and the underlying issue of poverty mean thousands of families who usually rely on growing their own food can’t afford to buy the food available in the market. In October 2011, the Burkinabe government reported the price of maize had increased by 35 per cent compared to 2010. *
Those who have livestock are having to sell them at lower than usual prices, in order to buy their staple foods, knowing they still have difficult months ahead of them until their next harvest, around October.
Families without livestock assets are turning to more extreme coping mechanisms, such as: searching for wild food; reducing the number of meals they eat; depending on friends and extended family; sending girls to the city to work as home help and men leaving to look for work in the Ivory Coast.
Uncertain future
“People are not realising how bad it is,” Mohamed says. “But sometimes we spend a day without eating at all. Also, there’s no pasture for the lambs and they are not in a good state. We have to sell our lambs to buy some rice or millet, but the price we can sell them for is going down and the price of grains is going up.
“I’ve had to sell 15 lambs over the last seven months. I have never experienced it like this before. Last year one bag of millet cost 12,000 CFA francs [£15] and now it is double around 27,000 CFA [£33]. We don’t have enough money to buy millet to last us until the next harvest and we don’t have stocks of food, we are really suffering.
“Already, we are only eating once instead of three times a day and this has been going on for seven months.”
Red Cross food vouchers enable families to buy basic foods at local shops in their villages to meet their immediate needs without having to sell off more assets. In most cases, vouchers are preferable to distributing food parcels as they have the extra benefit of stimulating local markets, ensuring traders don’t take their produce elsewhere.
Despite his situation Mohamed has a generous smile. As he picks up his food voucher and heads off to the local store, he says: “This will help us survive for some weeks. After that, I don’t know what the future will be, but I must keep my family together.”
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- W.Africa Food Security Working Group, Sahel Strategy 2012